Data exploration or mining has become an important activity in automatically reviewing large collections of text documents, for a wide variety of business, academic or other purposes. In that context, it is often important to identify the different ways in which a particular object, concept or issue is mentioned in such a collection of documents.
By way of an illustrative example, a data exploration or mining arrangement can review customer surveys relating to automobiles. If there is an interest in finding all customer surveys that mention dealers, it may not be sufficient merely to search using just the words “dealer” and “dealership”. This could well overlook a large number of surveys that include common or peculiar abbreviations such as “dlr”, “dlrship” or “dlshp”, along with common misspellings such as “daeler”.